"Fiat money is backed by men with guns; Bitcoin is not. So why should this thing have any value?"--Uber statist economist Paul Krugman.

Friday, November 9, 2012

GOTV: or how (and why) Democrats win elections

No point in re-inventing the wheel. In the case of Get Out the Vote efforts, the modern Democratic Party has not only invented the wheel, it had gotten all the way up to steel-belted radials, while the Republicans (and us Libertarians) are still trying to file the edges off the stone.

- Weeks before the election, Democratic party workers start knocking on my door to find out whether or not I am registered to vote and GET me registered if not (presumably they do not do this in the Republican parts of the county -- they're hitting areas where they expect the people they register to almost certainly vote Democrat).

- A week or two before the election, I start getting robo-calls to tell me how close it is and how important it is that I vote. Those calls run about 3:1 Democratic.

And on election day, my phone rings off the hook with prominent Democrats urging me to vote, offering me a ride to the polls, screeching that the election depends on my participation, etc. Back when I voted, those calls stopped once I and my wife had voted, which leads me to believe that there's a watcher at each polling place, communicating to the phone banks when they can scratch names off lists.

They've updated the Democratic Party's already stellar pre-Internet voter ID operations, and they've built on some of the tech that came out of Howard Dean's 2004 campaign to turn their ID ops into very targeted outreach.

All the tech in the world won't help you if it's not put into local, grassroots action, though, and that is where the Democrats shine.

ORCA was the Romney campaign's attempt to put together similar tech. If fell apart under its first real stress. But even if it hadn't, they were behind the curve because they didn't deploy it until election day.

As the election approached, some of my Republican friends thought one indicator of Romney's impending victory was that he had huge attendance at his rallies and Obama/Biden weren't drawing crowds as big.

The reason Obama/Biden's rallies were smaller was that THEIR supporters were knocking on doors and working phone banks instead of standing around waving signs and listening to Bruce Springsteen.

My experience with GOTV is most "contacts" are no answer, followed by voicemail/answering machines, then wrong/disconnected numbers, and "DON'T CALL ME AGAIN !!!". The few people willing to talk were set in their minds over who they were voting for. My impression of GOTV is that its effectiveness is uncertain or overestimated.

I believe a more important point made by Tom Knapp is:

"You can lose a hotly contested election even with a great ground game and very effective GOTV (for example, by telling the fastest-growing voter demographic that their relatives should 'self-deport')."

Romney lost because he was a real lousy candidate, with a real lousy message of bashing people who might vote for him, war-mongering and real lousy track record of off-shoring and mass lay-offs. To lose against a standard lousy candidate like Obomba, Romney had to be real lousy.

Against Romney, the election was Obomba's to lose.

There is a saying in advertising that the best advertising can not sell a troubled product, unless the competition's product is more troubled than yours. ...GOTV or not.